Month April 2013

Yesterday afternoon while scootering to the post office to mail my tax returns, I suddenly remembered that I’d recently received my Emory University Alumni Card, that the card was in my wallet, and that this might be a good day to make my virgin trip to Emory’s graduate library, which the alumni card allows me to use.

Actually, yesterday’s trip to Emory’s library wouldn’t be my first one, as I’d spent many an afternoon there as a library science student over 30 years ago. Still, it was my first post-retirement trip to this library, and I was curious to find out how it would feel to become an Emory library user again.

Not only had Emory’s library enlarged and transformed itself (evidently several times) since 1979 – to the point that it might as well be a different institution than the one I remembered – but I’d completely forgotten about how much fun it is to wander around the campus (and inside the impressive library) of a thriving, beautifully landscaped university abuzz with youthful energy. (So many international students, too!) As long as I ignored the disappointingly large subset of students staring into iPhones and/or listening to earphones, I could still sense the unique, insular excitement that a visit to almost any college – well, any old and/or beautiful campus – invariably triggers.

Sheer nostalgia probably produced most of my excitement yesterday. When I escaped suburbia for college at age 18, I arrived at Mercer University (in Macon, Georgia) feeling liberated – a feeling that lasted for four glorious years. Those feelings of liberation and optimism swelled up again when I returned to grad school at Emory some ten years later, and cropped up whenever I visited other campuses, including campuses in other countries.

At any rate, yesterday, after chatting with the Emory library’s current reference desk staff (whose average age seemed to be about 19), I duly wandered off, still rather in a daze, into the bowels of the graduate library’s “book tower.” I assumed I’d find there a title or two about – oh, the joys of reading perhaps (potential fodder for the other blog I write), or maybe something about gardening.

Instead, I found not only dozens of titles I was eager to skim and/or borrow some day, but I also discovered wonderful places to sit and examine the books I pulled from the shelves yesterday and the books that I will find on future visits. These heretofore-unknown-to-me niches have comfortable chairs complete with pleasant, bird’s-eye views of the campus and the distant Atlanta skyline. I also eventually located the library’s snack bar, its acres of internet terminals, and the window-clad and seating-lined bridge to an adjacent building where the library shelves its periodicals.

What was really unexpected, however, was how completely happy I felt as I spent a few glorious hours exploring this vast library. Not only was yesterday a beautiful day weatherwise – perfecct for doing anything, really, including taking a short break from my modest spring gardening projects – but it gradually, deliciously dawned on me that:

This virtually inexhaustible resource for enjoyment is also amazingly convenient to where I happen to live: a mere 2 miles from my front door. Plus, Emory – bless its progressive little heart – provides free parking for visitors using bicycles or motor scooters!

Being now a retired person – a condition I’m still finding it difficult to believe I’m blessed to enjoy – I finally have thetime to roam the collections at Emory whenever I feel like it. (And Emory’s library hours are a lot more extensive than my public library’s hours are.)

Emory allows me to borrow – and renew online if necessary – whatever materials I choose to take home with me, or to take outside and read somewhere on Emory’s enchanting campus.

I knew before yesterday, of course, that I love libraries, that I have always loved libraries, and that I love this particular library. But I underestimated how completely congenial library-visiting was going to feel when I was no longer working every day in one. Or how congenial using this particular library (again) would feel.

Another exceedingly pleasant surprise along the still-new-to-Calvin Retirement Journey!

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From Cal’s Commonplace Book

The Constant Reader

Books Read This Year

Updated February 20, 2019

“I continue to think of myself as someone who is essentially a reader—a man who takes a deep pleasure in good books, who views reading as a fine mode of acquiring experience, and who still brings the highest expectations to what he reads. By the highest expectations I mean that I am perhaps a naïve person who has never ceased to believe that books can change his life, and decisively so.” – Joseph Epstein (from Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives [1989], quoted by Patrick Kurp at his blog Anecdotal Evidence)

JUST FINISHED:

Asymmetry (2018) by Lisa Halliday

I read this award-winning debut novel for my book club. The book is devoted to two different sets of characters (and two different settings). Halliday is an excellent writer, but I couldn’t find myself caring too much about the fate of the main characters in the first story (involving a Manhattan-based novelist and his much younger mistress). The second set of characters (an Iraqi-American and his family and acquaintances) were also drawn very vividly, but what I appreciated the most about this part of the book was Halliday’s skillful insertion of the horrific damage caused to civilians by the U.S. government’s imperialistic venture in Iraq. The third part of the novel (an interview with the novelist featured in the first part of Asymmetry) seemed tacked on and unnecessary. I’d recommend this author, but not this book.

CURRENTLY READING (in addition to trying to keep up with the most recent issues of the planet’s two best magazines, The Sun and the New Yorker):

A Southern Garden (1942) by Elizabeth Lawrence

As William James Said: Extracts from the Published Writings of William James (1942) edited by Elizabeth Perkins Aldrich

BOOKS FINISHED EARLIER THIS YEAR:

An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town(2009) by David Farley

I ran across this book at a recent library book sale, and am so glad I did. Part travel diary, part detective story, part history, it has two things bound to capture my interest: it’s a chronicle of an American living for a year in a tiny Italian hilltop town for a year, intermingled with a dogged quest for understanding (and locating) a notorious holy relic. Who knew that the fervent veneration of Jesus’s circumcised foreskin (yes, you read that correctly!) had such a long and interesting career? Farley’s sense of humor and his scrupulous scholarship, together make this a delightful romp of a book – and a thoroughly entertaining case study of the absurdity (and lucrativeness) of religious cults. And I was happy to see, in Farley’s notes, his reference to another Italy-themed travelog I enjoyed reading years ago, Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the history of the World (2007).

In the Morning: Reflections from First Light (2006) by Philip Lee Williams

Like me, this book’s author is a “morning person.” Unlike me, he writes about his early morning walks, and this book is a sampling of the thoughts that those pre-dawn walks have provoked over the years. Williams is both a poet and a science writer, and his ruminations show that fact. Williams lives about 90 miles from where I do, so that was an added plus in my enjoyment of these essays.

Somewhere Near the End: A Memoir (2009) by Diana Athill

By happy coincidence, the same week that one of my author heroines, Diana Athill, died (at age 101), I discovered that I’d at some point purchased – but never got around to starting – a copy of Somewhere Near the End, now over eight years old. I eagerly plucked it from my bookshelf and spent most of the next three days devouring it. The adjectives in the blurbs excerpted from the book’s reviews are, for once, are spot-on: “remorseless and tender,” “a wisdom more ambient than aphoristic,” “refreshingly candid,” “fiercely intelligent…and never dull,” “unflinching,” “deals with growing old with bravery, humor and honesty,” “prose as clear and graceful as ever,” “brilliant; entirely lacking in the usual regrets [and] nostalgia.” “as unalarmed by the prospect of death as by the seeming meaninglessness of the universe,” “her easy-going prose and startling honesty are riveting”, “bracingly frank…joyful rather than grim.’ Or, to use the description supplied by the organization that gave this book its annual award for biography: “candid, detailed, charming, totally lacking in self-pity or sentimentality and, above all, beautifully, beautifully written.” If I were ever to embark on any writing project myself, I would aim to write with the precision, the honesty, and the humility of Diana Athill.

Gay Men and Women Who Enriched the World(1988; updated 1997) by Tom Cowan

Brief and straightforward biographical sketches of over 40 lesbians and gay men who enriched the fields of art, literature, theater, music, science, social science, or philosophy. A bit like spending time reading a series of Wikipedia entries, I was often surprised at the author’s ability to clearly express why he’d chosen these particular worthies over the ones he omitted. In any case, I learned – in almost every bio – something new (to me) and important about celebrities I (mistakenly) thought I already knew a fair amount about.

Ultimate Questions (2016) by Brian Magee

I am not familiar with the Britain-based Magee’s earlier works, but am so glad he wrote this one and so glad I found it. (His earlier book, ThePhilosophy of Schopenhauer will be the next book by Magee that I will track down). One reviewer wrote about this book: “Magee writes clearly, without jargon, and he makes his case for profound agnosticism with considerable force.” Exactly so; in fact, this is probably the single most compelling book of modern philosophy I have ever read. It’s also one of the most eloquent and least pompous books of philosophy I have ever read. This is a book I will buy a copy of for the sheer pleasure of re-reading its arrestingly clear (and mostly irrefutable) sentences.

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018) by James Clear

This book’s bringing together of what scientists and psychologists know about habit formation (the making of new ones, the breaking of old ones) is not only useful, but entertainingly presented. Because of the author’s engaging style and his incorporation of findings from multiple post-behaviorism fields (like neurolinguistic programming), it took a while for me to realize that the book is largely a recapitulation of what I’d learned in college (50 years ago!) about operant conditioning. Still, there were things about how habits are formed and how they persist that I needed to be reminded of, especially some of the counter-intuitive features of habit formation, and I am using some of the author’s tips to create some better habits in 2019 – and to get rid of a few undesirable ones.